Space
Event Horizon And Sgr A*: For The First Time We Can 'See' The Black Hole At The Center Of Our Galaxy
At the centere of our galaxy, the Milky Way, there exists what must be a black hole. But detecting it has been challenging because of the cosmic dust around it.
Now, for the first time, a group of radio antennas knows as the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration have unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole four million times more massive than our Sun.
known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*, pronounced "sadge-ay-star") it obviously can't be seen, that is built into the black hole name, but it can be inferred thanks to a dark central region (called a “shadow”) surrounded by a bright…
Real astronomical images rarely look like their artist representations. The images produced by the Event Horizon Telescope will be no different. That said, an image of the light near the event horizon of the black hole at the center of our galaxy will be many times more detailed than the famous image of a similar black hole from the galaxy M87. The main reasons for this are distance and improvements in the instrument. M87 is about 53 million light years away. While the center of our own galaxy, Sagittarius A*, is just about 26,000 light years away. …
By looking at the ‘shadows’ of two supermassive black holes in the process of colliding, astronomers may have a way to measure black holes in distant galaxies and test competing theories of gravity.
Three years ago, the first ever image of a black hole, at the center of galaxy Messier 87, came into focus thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope, a global network of synchronized radio dishes acting as one giant telescope.
Now a new imaging technique could allow astronomers to study black holes smaller than M87’s, a monster with a mass of 6.5 billion suns, harbored in galaxies more distant than…
The mysteries of the universe are profound but one solution has long been sought; how events at the edge of our solar system, the beginning of the rest of the universe, brought about evolution of earth, the other planets, and even life itself.
A new paper speculates about how the gas giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — ended up where they are, orbiting the sun like they do. They try to figure an explanation for what happened to gas giants in other solar systems and ours- and try to make an education guess if a fifth gas giant lurks 50 billion miles away. A new planet 9, or a…
Hank |
Fermilab, now a tourist attraction, found the Higgs Boson before the Large Hadron Collider did, but the lack of comparative luminosity made it a struggle to know that as quickly as the LHC did.
That's why the discovery of a star by Hubble 28 billion lightyears away, a new record, may not last long if everything goes as planned with its long-delayed successor, the James Webb Space Telescope. It's so far away that Hubble can't tell astronomers if it is even one star or two, because statistical blips in the data need more clarity that a deeper space telescope will provide.
The star,…
Pluto, the Solar System’s largest dwarf planet, just became even more interesting with a report that icy lava flows have recently covered substantial tracts of its surface. In this context, “recently” means probably no more than a billion years ago. That’s old, of course – and there is no suggestion that volcanoes are still active – but it’s only a quarter the age of the Solar System and no one knows how Pluto brewed up the heat needed to power these eruptions.
The news, coming nearly seven years after NASA’s New Horizons probe made its spectacular flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015, is thanks…
The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope peered into the universe and captured one of the most stunning images you will ever see. According to Live Science, the observatory captured an image of a faroff star photobombed by thousands of galaxies, giving us a first glance into the telescope’s historic mission.
What is the James Webb Space Telescope?
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s most powerful space telescope. Launched on Christmas Day last year from French Guaiana, it reached its final observation post in January this year, some one million miles from earth.…
Though often get graphical representations of what an exoplanet that has been discovered might look like, in reality they are statistical wobbles.
And a new study finds that of the some 5,000 planets detected outside our solar system, three are likely not planets, but stars. The new analysis of the data finds that Kepler-854b, Kepler-840b, and Kepler-699b are probably between two and four times the size of Jupiter. So they are likely small stars instead.
A fourth planet, Kepler-747b, is about 1.8 times Jupiter’s size, which is comparable to the very largest confirmed planets. But Kepler-747b…
Given the invasion of Ukraine and how both the US and Russia regard the ISS with deep pride our abandoning it would send a strong message to Russia. There is no moral or ethical way to continue the ISS program as if nothing has fundamentally changed in the world.
To hardcore space nerds human space flight is imperative to the future of humanity long term and to abandon ISS without replacement would be a crime against history. Iss is to our time what the great Pyramid of Giza was to its time. ISS is a wonder of the world and of history. We will all be considered lucky to have…
Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-long bursts of radiation recorded on radio waves. They are extremely powerful - for example, during one of the brightest flashes lasting five milliseconds, as much energy is radiated as our Sun generates in a month. The scale of the phenomenon is difficult to imagine. A new study tracks down their source.
The first radio bursts were "discovered" barely 15 years ago. Until April 2020, all the FRBs observed by astronomers came from cosmological distances of hundreds of millions of light years. It was only two years ago that they also managed to track…